I am a Senior Political Contributor at Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests. However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset conservative thinkers. In addition to the pages of Forbes.com, you can find me every Saturday morning on your TV arguing with my more conservative colleagues on "Forbes on Fox" on the Fox News Network and at various other times during the week serving as a liberal talking head on other Fox News and Fox Business Network shows. I also serve as a Democratic strategist with Mercury Public Affairs.

The United States Congress-A Confederacy of Losers

On Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin (L-West Virginia) took to the floor of the United States Senate to issue a dramatic understatement of the obvious, saying, “ It is absolutely inexcusable that all of us find ourselves in this place at this time … with no plan and no apparent hope.”

While Senator Manchin’s remarks were intended to express the frustration and annoyance that so many Americans are feeling today, I note that his comments were ‘understated’ because, were he to actually say what many Americans of all political stripes are feeling, he would have found it completely impossible to avoid using the word ‘losers’ in his presentation.

This is, after all, what the legislative body of the world’s greatest superpower has become—a confederacy of losers.

With less than 24 hours remaining in a fiscal cliff drama that anyone and everyone should, by now, recognize as having become all about a craven need for attention being acted out by a bunch of people all too willing to make us pay for their never having been quite popular enough in high school, it should be clear that—no matter what sort of agreement these folks might manage to concoct before midnight tonight, if any—Congress has failed and failed in truly epic fashion.

Losers.

If you doubt this for a moment, I offer up yesterday’s Sunday morning television talk show circuit as Exhibit A.

On a Sunday morning where every single, solitary elected official drawing a federal paycheck should have been locked inside the U.S. Capitol or the White House busily engaging in the process of finding a solution, there was no shortage of politicians who found time to parade themselves before the cameras for the purpose of repeating accusations of blame that have been overused to the point where the sting of recrimination was long ago lost.

It began with President Obama’s appearance on “Meet the Press” where he devoted far too much of the interview placing the blame for this travesty onto the shoulders of the Congressional Republicans.

As much as I might agree with the President—and I do—I’ve done enough negotiating to know that if you really want to get to a deal, you are going to find it extremely counter-productive to throw accusations and blame into the air during the final hours of the negotiation. Every moment of Obama’s interview would have been better spent selling his fellow Americans on why his approach is the best path for the nation to take.

Naturally, the Congressional Republicans—for whom “maturity” is as much a four-letter word as “compromise”— could not help but take the bait as they fanned out through the TV landscape to hurl accusations at the President.

My favorite pre-school tongue lashing came from the mouth of Senator John Barrasso (L-Wyoming) who, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union”, treated us to, “The president is doing nothing about the addiction that his administration has to spending. He’s the spender in chief.”

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that this childish bit of overused hyperbole is the best one of our elite group of 100 can muster at a time of national trouble?

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Happy New Year, Rick, and thank you, again, for hitting the nail on the head philosophically and verbally, and with the clarity and enthusiasm I value in your comments. The dunces and losers in Congress still don’t seem to hear, feel, or intellectually grasp how truly and deeply their posturing and diddling is affecting millions of us as we consider our goals, finances and potential sacrifices in the new year. How dependably disappointing they’ve become.

Please keep up the excellent work of calling them out and using this wonderful forum to hold them accountable for falling so very dramatically short of the expectations we rightly hold that they will work together, creatively, and well.

And I think you look just fine. I wish you gentle peace and mighty writing in the new year…